Where is the News Breaking? Towards a Location-based Event Detection Framework for Journalists

Abstract

The rise of user-generated content (UCG) as a source of information in the journalistic lifecycle is driving the need for automated methods to detect, filter, contextualise and verify citizen reports of breaking news events. In this position paper we outline the technological challenges in incorporating UCG into news reporting and describe our proposed framework for exploiting UGC from social media for location-based event detection and filtering to reduce the workload of journalists covering breaking and ongoing news events. News organisations increasingly rely on manually curated UGC. Manual monitoring, filtering, verification and curation of UGC, however, is a time and effort consuming task, and our proposed framework takes a first step in addressing many of the issues surrounding these processes.